Infrastructure shouldn't even be considered "loans" or state spending but long term investments; despite all this commotion about new buses, the problem is that there's not enough alternative infrastructure in Dublin to compensate for the traffic issues. People aren't gonna give up the cars unless there's a more convenient or viable solution and all adding buses does is make the traffic situation worse.

What's needed is heavy rail (NOT more metro) and expansion of the luas network. IR isn't exactly perfect; it's got a few muppets running it that just aren't suitable for the job and shouldn't be there, but the government has compounded the issues as well by just not properly maintaining funding. Blaming the staff isn't the solution; either they're not the ones in charge but the network needs serious reworking improvements and expansion.

Hard to say "more metro" when there isn't any of it. And Luas is too small capacity-wise, too slow speed-wise in spite of its obvious misnomer (never mind conflicts with road traffic) and too unsafe security-wise. There should be several new lines of underground DART serving new city sections and suburbs in a radial fashion and at least one circular route to connect them further out from the city (of course, the way the government people think, they'll have to start removing bus routes, so watch out for that), and the Luas lines converted to DART if possible (definitely eliminating the surface tram lines in the city at least and going underground with that); indeed the whole thing should have been DART for the sake of having fewer spare parts inventories, not as much duplication of facilities, faster average speeds due to not being caught in road traffic (as with trams), and ease of transfer of equipment from line to line in case of need, but that ship may have sailed.